Buoyant house prices are far from the only benefits of living in a town with a natural spring
A rather severe marble girl on the little temperance fountain in the centre of Bath pours eternally from a jug above the inscription “Water is Best”. She is right – or so it appears, in every sense, from the latest index of UK property prices. Spa towns have an average premium of 16% over houses in neighbouring places where springs have yet to bubble or stink. In some hotspots, such as Boston Spa and Ilkley in West Yorkshire, prices are almost twice the level for the rest of the county. Life is not always fair, but it seems specially perverse that fissures should open and allow natural water to the surface largely in areas already generously blessed. Leave aside property prices, and Bath, Ilkley and most of the others would be lovely if no chalybeate or other soothing water had ever seeped from their soil. But the dips and douches created their own virtuous circle; from Buxton to Royal Tunbridge Wells, and even at little Askern near Doncaster, fine architecture followed the hypochondriacs and now attracts wealthy buyers. And the benefits may spread. Just as the best place to live in Cheltenham is not in a Regency house but opposite one, so the canniest property buyers will go for cheaper towns near spas and so have the best of both worlds. And perhaps, live in geothermal hope. Let us not forget that “Nil sine aqua” was the motto of humble south Staffordshire’s waterworks company, while their counterparts in Grimsby had “E rupe erumpet aqua” (Let water gush from the rock).
In praise of… the Du Maurier spell
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011Her fictional version of Cornwall was a dark, secretive place of passion and romance
The Cornish house that is now on the market has only a small connection with the writer, but the Du Maurier spell is potent enough to bewitch it. Few writers are so intimately linked to a place that became theirs through adoption as Daphne is, through novels like Rebecca, Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek, to Cornwall. No surprise that there is a successful annual festival in her honour each May in Fowey. Yet Du Maurier was 20 when she first saw Menabilly, the probable model for Manderley, which is as significant as the characters of Danvers or Rebecca herself, and it was another 15 years before she could afford to live there. By then she had already created her Cornwall in fiction: a dark, secretive place of passion and romance curiously at odds with Du Maurier’s own wide-eyed beauty and gung-ho attitude to outdoor exercise. Despite the jarring intensity of The Birds in 1952 and Don’t Look Now (1970), it was only much later that the dark, secretive side of Du Maurier’s own character became an accepted influence on her work. The middlebrow writer is now more highly rated as a psychological realist, a woman grappling with her own complex relationship with her brilliant father, the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, whose languid stage presence and pressing need for cash inspired the eponymous cigarette. Hard to imagine a more agreeable companion for a lazy afternoon on a Cornish beach than the irresistible mix of surface charm and secret passion of a Du Maurier.
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